Between The Buried And Me – Best Of (Victory Records)
I first became aware of this band back in 2001 when they released their debut EP. Having grown directly out of pioneering North Carolina metalcore band Prayer For Cleansing, they had a lot of friends in Richmond as soon as they started, one of whom was then a bandmate of mine. He played their three-song demo to death during our summer 2001 tour, and I soon knew it by heart. It was intriguingly schizophrenic; often occupied with brutal death-metal thrashing or thick, chunky tough-guy breakdowns, Between The Buried And Me were just as likely to break into an extended melodic section that drew its main influence from emo bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and/or melodic progressive metal bands like Opeth.
Between The Buried And Me – Best Of (Victory Records)
I first became aware of this band back in 2001 when they released their debut EP. Having grown directly out of pioneering North Carolina metalcore band Prayer For Cleansing, they had a lot of friends in Richmond as soon as they started, one of whom was then a bandmate of mine. He played their three-song demo to death during our summer 2001 tour, and I soon knew it by heart. It was intriguingly schizophrenic; often occupied with brutal death-metal thrashing or thick, chunky tough-guy breakdowns, Between The Buried And Me were just as likely to break into an extended melodic section that drew its main influence from emo bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and/or melodic progressive metal bands like Opeth.
The problem with this approach was made clear over time. As Between The Buried And Me continued to make records, growing more and more popular all the time, the differences between the two sounds they mainly explored–one powerful and heavy, one light and ethereal–became more and more pronounced. Instead of being intriguingly schizophrenic, as they’d started out, they grew downright off-putting. After all, if you’re really enjoying a particularly ripping brutal riff, the last thing you want to hear is an extended melodic prog-metal breakdown. And conversely, if you’ve just heard a gorgeous three-minute emo interlude, a brutal mosh part that would sound brilliant in other circumstances is just going to get on your nerves.
Unfortunately, it was exactly these sorts of completely unconventional transitions that Between The Buried And Me began to rely on in order to make them stand out from the pack. Nothing makes that clearer than the selection of songs contained on this two-disc greatest hits collection (who exactly determines what songs constitute the greatest hits of a band with no charting singles? I guess that’s why they went the “Best Of” route with the title). Over the two-plus hours of its complete running time, the transitions between brutality and melody come at regular intervals. What makes this really hard to deal with is the way that any part you really start to get into inevitably sounds nothing like the part that follows it. The classic cliche so regularly delivered by tech-metal fans confronted with a subpar example of their chosen genre is: “They have good parts, but not good songs.” Between The Buried And Me damn near invented this cliche.
Take a song like “Mordecai,” which opens the compilation. It’s heavy throughout the first two minutes of the nearly six-minute track, before detouring into an undistorted, melodically-strummed section over which the vocals reach borderline-operatic levels of melodrama. This section continues on, rising and falling in intensity, for the entire last two-thirds of the track. And that’s fine–it actually draws me in during its extended length. But when the next song, “Ad A Dglgmut,” begins with death metal growling over a blast beat, it totally wrecks the mood that has been created previously. “Ad A Dglgmut” itself is perhaps worse; after three minutes, it also switches from heavy mosh to emo-derived octave-chord melodies topped with a melancholy minor-key solo that sounds like something from a Testament record. And that’s cool, just like the first three brutal minutes are cool–the problem is that they are in the same song, and they don’t sound like they should be. In fact, the two different sections don’t sound like they should be by the same band, a feeling that only grows worse when, by minute five, the song has dropped into a quiet, melodic post-metal part–only to return promptly to the blasting metal of the song’s beginning just after minute six. Why anyone thought all of these parts should share the same song is beyond me. These guys just can’t resist putting everything but the kitchen sink into their songs; it is both their most distinctive trait and their ultimate downfall.
As you may well have predicted by now, the most consistently enjoyable tunes on this two-disc compilation are the shortest ones; “Alaska” spends four minutes charging full speed ahead through complex tech-metal sections and the occasional heavy breakdown without once breaking the mood. “Aesthetics” is mainly concerned with brutal mosh breakdowns, but stays heavy even when tempos are changing, making its three minute length quite satisfying as well. So of course, the question must be raised–why can’t Between The Buried And Me just write entire albums like this? Why must they push everything to ridiculous lengths, carry every baroque tempo change completely over the top, and bloat the lion’s share of their songs to somewhere above 7 minutes in length? Well, they sell plenty of records to teenage metalcore fans who buy t-shirts from Hot Topic, so maybe it really is better to be distinctive than good. But that still doesn’t mean that you should buy this compilation.
